My dad: “Yeah, maybe a good solution to the problem of not being able to pay rent would be government-provided housing”

Also my dad: “Socialism is horrible! If it wasn’t, then why would EVERYONE be trying to leave Communist countries like Russia and the rest of Eastern Europe???”

When I played Cyberpunk 2077 for the first time, I chose the “nomad” backstory which defines essentially a character who has been so burned by late stage capitalism that they ran away to live in a small commune in the desert.

While playing through the game, I thought the advertisements littering Night City were incredibly jarring like they were supposed to be from a Borderlands game, or at least one that was way more tongue-in-cheek. The world of Night City was far too depressing to reasonably include those utterly ridiculous ads and it made it hard for me to feel immersed. Then it hit me; that’s exactly how I was supposed to feel, and then it paradoxically made me feel like this game set in a future world with insanely high-tech appliances available to all its citizens was indistinguishable from my own. I literally forgot multiple times that this game was set in an alternate future and not just in some city in California

Severance is an all too graphic caricature of life in corporate America and I had a visceral reaction to watching it that made me feel dead it was awful don’t watch it because the show is magnificently well done and immaculately satirical stay away from this terrifyingly good show watch it

I think therapy helps as a remediation, but it’s not preventive nor does it fully solve the problem because ultimately it’s transactional and paying someone to listen is fully different from finding someone who listens to you that you also want to listen to.

Traditional masculinity dictates that men don’t share their feelings (with the exception of anger and aggression because that’s not a feeling that’s just being manly). Sadness, despair, loneliness, depression all will be commonly bottled up and left untreated which leads to deep-seated feelings of isolation. The cure has to be a change in social norms, including decoupling the ideas of being socially vulnerable with being feminine.

This is a gross generalization of the issue but it definitely describes my experience with it.